Here's the last part of the article.
(Too long to fit in one bite).


For some, any idea is ‘hopeless’

Even if such solutions can be found, their potential unintended consequences still give scientists pause.

Moshe Alamaro, a retired research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was among those who participated in a 2008 workshop convened by the Department of Homeland Security to spotlight the possibilities and, perhaps, promise of hurricane modification. But he has since changed his mind on the idea.

Even if a plan could work, he wondered, what would happen if an altered storm spared one community but went on to kill people somewhere else? What if a modified typhoon blew past Japan only to hit North Korea? “You would get World War III,” he said.

“I was foolish enough to think it would work,” Alamaro said. “I came to the conclusion that it’s hopeless. The only remedy is not to build near shore and improve construction standards.”

Until further testing of ideas can happen, the totality of potentially dangerous consequences on ecosystems, wildlife, fisheries and crops remain unclear. If human intervention were to cool Gulf surface waters, for example, it could have effects on weather across the United States and beyond, Willoughby said.

“Where do you think the rain that causes crops to grow in the American heartland comes from?” he asked.

Scientifically, it’s also impossible to prove any intervention works, Trepanier said. An experiment requires a control, so that scientists can see what would have happened had they not intervened.

And then there are the sheer logistical challenges. Hurricanes are massive systems, releasing amounts of energy on par with what the world’s electrical grids are capable of carrying. Research has suggested that even an immense amount of energy put toward weakening a hurricane could only marginally reduce its intensity.

And besides, that energy must be transferred somehow, or else it would simply keep building up in the tropics and overheat them, Trepanier said. Hurricanes are nature’s way of redistributing that energy. If we somehow stopped a hurricane from unleashing that energy, the next one might be even bigger.

In explaining why NOAA no longer conducts experiments to alter hurricanes, agency officials say altering a hurricane would require scientific advancements we can still only dream of.

“Maybe the time will come when men and women can travel at nearly the speed of light to the stars,” officials wrote on a NOAA website answering common questions about hurricanes. “We will then have enough energy for brute-force intervention in hurricane dynamics.”